The service offered to unfreeze Lab Zero’s funds if it would agree to take on the burden of providing refunds if necessary, but the developer refused; the point of its crowd-funding campaign is to provide money for development costs, and it’s going to spend it, not fill up a silo and go swimming.

Lab Zero CEO Bartholow took to NeoGAF to vent his frustrations, and in a series of posts collated by GamesIndustry, revealed that PayPal finally unfroze the account but withheld $35,000 as collateral. Other developers have not experienced this problem using rival services like Amazon, Bartholow said, and he has filed a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The vast majority of Skullgirls backers used PayPal to donate, so the service was sitting on $700,000 of the $829,000 raised through Indiegogo.

Lab Zero Games originally asked for just $150,000 to develop a single DLC character, but netted enough to make four, with story and stages for three of them, among with a host of other goodies for backers and fans. Skullgirls is available on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and is headed to PC.